UBC psychology researchers Ara Norenzayan and Will Gervais are on a roll. They’ve done some remarkable research in the past eight years into why people are either religious, agnostic or atheist. Their reports on the implications of religiosity have drawn attention from media around the world.

In the past, the two researchers have either individually or together shown how early exposure to death makes people more religious; how atheist countries operate at higher levels of mutual trust than religious societies, how many people still see atheists as the moral equivalent of rapists and how religious people tend to be more generous, at least under certain conditions.

Preparing this piece had me going through my older stories on the dynamic research duo. That includes the first one I ever wrote, in 2004, on Norenzayan. His passion to understand religion was fuelled by his experience as a young lad in war-torn Beirut, Lebanon. Religion both contributed to the conflict and helped heal some of its wounds.

In addition to my 2004 report, below, I’ve provided links to the various pieces I’ve posted on Gervais and Norenzayan, including my profile of the latter

Faith, death and violence:

A researcher seeks to determine why some people turn to hatred

Vancouver Sun ARCHIVES
Friday, Nov 26 2004
Column: Douglas Todd

University of B.C. psychology professor Ara Norenzayan grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, during a savage religion-fuelled war between Christians and Muslims. As an altar boy in the Armenian Orthodox Church, he sensed the power of religion for good and evil.

He also became familiar with death.

Now, 15 years after emigrating to North America at the peak of Lebanon’s bloody conflict, Norenzayan is returning to his roots to research the relationship between faith, thoughts of death and violence.

The soft-spoken social psychologist has received a $105,000, three-year grant from Canada’s national research council to deepen his exploration into why people become religious and some turn to hatred.

Devising unique psychological experiments, Norenzayan has already discovered that the more people are exposed to the reality of death, the more likely they are to believe in “supernatural agents,” like God, angels or ancestral spirits.

He’s also concluded prominent scientists, such as Richard Dawkins, are off track when they argue belief in God is, along with the atomic bomb, the greatest danger to world peace.

Norenzayan’s studies suggest antagonism toward outsiders is not a result of belief in God. It’s the byproduct of people finding a sense of identity in a religious group.

To find out if there is a link between thoughts of death and belief in the supernatural, Norenzayan devised two series of tests, one involving hundreds of students at UBC and another involving subjects in Malaysia.

He asked one group to write essays about death, reflect on pain in the context of mortality and read a short story about a boy who dies. He asked the control group to think about pain in relation to visiting a dentist and read a story about a boy who doesn’t die.

Norenzayan and his team found subjects asked to contemplate death were much more likely than those who weren’t to report they strongly believe in supernatural agents.

Norenzayan says his experiments are the first to provide “solid empirical evidence” to back up theories by Soren Kierkegaard and Ernest Becker that humans become religious because they’re capable of recognizing they will die.

“One of the definitions of religion is it’s a way of dealing with anxiety-provoking thoughts,” Norenzayan says in his tidy third-floor office overlooking the forest and ocean surrounding UBC, as quiet classical music plays.

“All religions say death is not literally death, that mortality is not the end of our being.”

Norenzayan — who maintains he’s not a “strict” religious believer, despite maintaining ties to the Armenian Orthodox Church — says it’s shocking how little research psychologists have done into the origins and effects of spirituality.

“Most academics are blind to the power of religion.”

A typical psychology textbook, he says, contains virtually no mention of religion, despite the 19th-century American founder of psychology, William James, devoting a great deal of energy to the subject.

“Most psychologists have no idea why two people who are probably equally religious — the Dalai Lama and Osama bin Laden — could end up being so different, with one teaching peace and one preaching violence.”

With his grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Norenzayan plans to make his first trip to Lebanon since he left at age 18.

He’ll explore more deeply the impression he developed as a young man in the war-torn country that spiritual beliefs can be exploited by leaders to foment aggression against outsiders.

And he’ll continue his experiments into why religion can breed both peace-loving tolerance and intolerant fury, in the Middle East and North America.

Norenzayan recognizes religion isn’t the only cause of violence, but he also believes it “is at the top of the list of ideologies that can kill.”

How exactly does religion lead to mayhem?

Ara Norenzayan recognizes religion isn’t the only cause of violence, but he also believes it “is at the top of the list of ideologies that can kill.”

Norenzayan and his graduate student, Ian Hansen, have discovered it’s not spiritual devotion that causes violence.

Norenzayan’s work builds on studies of Palestinian Muslims by his alma mater, the University of Michigan, where researchers found the more often Palestinian Muslims attended mosque, the more they supported suicide terrorism. There was no link, however, between Palestinians’ support for violence and how often they prayed at home.

The goal of one of Norenzayan’s experiments was to test North Americans on their tolerance of religious pluralism. In effect, he wanted to explore how subjects would respond to someone like the main character in Yann Martel’s book, The Life of Pi, who claims he’s a Hindu, a Muslim and a Christian.

Norenzayan’s team discovered Buddhists were most tolerant of followers of other religions. Christians were less tolerant and Muslims were the least tolerant.

Norenzayan believes that may be because Christianity and Islam provide more group cohesion, leading to a belief there’s only one true religion.

So how does thinking about death relate to religious tolerance?

For one thing, Norenzayan found study participants who were reminded frequently about death were more likely to believe in supernatural agents from not only their own religion, but from other religions.

In other words, a Christian contemplating death would become more open to the Asian idea of revering ancestors.

“There’s an old saying: ‘In a storm, voyagers will believe in any god to rescue them.’ To some extent, it’s hopeful that people facing death will consider addressing other supernatural agents,” says Norenzayan.

But his research also led him to a more negative side-effect tied to when people think often about death: They become less accepting of people who don’t belong to their culture.

Many Christians, for instance, became less tolerant of Jews and less tolerant of prostitutes. More intense thoughts about death “seemed to make people draw stronger cultural boundaries.”

Norenzayan is also wondering what the ramifications of his research are for North America since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which made a lot more North Americans anxious about their mortality.

He believes the terrorist attacks created a unique experimental condition for a study of how increasing consciousness of death affects religious tolerance.

“Sept. 11,” he says, “was one humongous manipulation of North Americans’ thoughts about death.”

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